Driving the point home, the top 10 fastest supercomputers all run Linux of one sort or the other. You have to go the way to the 44th fastest computer, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts box, which runs IBM's AIX Unix variant, to find one that doesn't run Linux.

No, the real surprise is that the Tianhe-2 (aka "Milky Way 2"), with its performance of 33.86 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, came in with more than twice the performance of the top-rated system at the end of November 2012, and it did it on Intel chips.

Intel plans on keeping both the fastest and most power-efficient titles in the future with a new generation of Xeon Phi "Knight's Landing" chips. The company also wants to keep its dominance of the market as a whole. Just over 80 percent — 403 computers — out of the Top500 now use Intel processors.

Regardless of the hardware, when it comes to supercomputer dominance, the real champion is Linux. No matter what the architecture, the world's fastest computers run Linux, and there's no reason to think that will change anytime soon.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it.His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications...
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